The Life and Letters of Kate Gleason

2 Sibley Sue

9 CHAPTER 2 Sibley Sue Although William sold five gear planers in 1876 and six in 1877, the banking crisis hit Rochester hard, and by 1878 he was hanging on by sheer force of will. Industry and investment were at a virtual standstill. That year the firm sold only a single planer, and the following year sales were limited to three machines. The collapse of business was a searing experience for William. “To his last days,” his daughter Eleanor recalled, “the man at the head of that struggling business had every so often a nightmare in which he dreamt that it was Friday night and he had no money to meet Saturday’s payroll. Perhaps it was a certain seriousness brought on by those worries and responsibilities that caused him to be called sometimes ‘The Governor,’ more often ‘The Old Man,’ even before he was fifty.”1 In 1879, William cut his work force from a hundred fifty men to three; he had his back against the wall. “We were working only five hours a day,” an employee remembered, “and on Saturdays [we] carried home more money than he took home to his family; he always managed to scrape up money for us.”2 To keep costs down, and since the firm employed just a handful of workers, Kate, at age fourteen, decided that she could handle the bookkeeping by herself. “Father backed me up then,” she said, “as he backed me up all of his life,” and he gave her one dollar, her first pay, after her first day at her new job.3 Somehow, Kate lost the dollar on the way home, to the consternation of her mother and grandmother, but it was never the pay that motivated Kate; it was the challenge of the business and her drive to help her father make it successful. Soon she was spending many hours a day at the firm, and she had no time for more feminine pursuits. Every day, she recalled, 10 the life and letters of kate gleason I got up at four a.m. and studied, went to school at eight, got out at one, went home to dinner, then to the office, worked until six, went home, ate supper, and went to bed. The neighbors used to expostulate with Mother, and when she wanted me to go to dancing school, I rebelled. She told me Jim, my younger brother, was so shy that I must go to stir him up a bit; I found later that she had told Jim I was so uncouth I must be made more civilized, and so we each endured it for the other, both hating it with all our hearts.4 Soon the Gleason firm began prospering again, thanks in part to the boom in the oil business. From 1878 to 1880, Standard Oil was constructing the largest pipeline in the world in the Bradford oil fields, in western Pennsylvania and southwestern New York. The Gleason business, with its reputation for fine machinists’ tools, had designed lathe features especially for the oil market. William’s customers were loyal. In 1881, his business had recovered enough to allow him to buy the firm’s building for $25,000, and he and Ellen celebrated the birth of another daughter, Ellen (who later called herself Eleanor) on March 4th; their family was complete. Kate, now sixteen, was already graduating from high school at the Rochester Free Academy, the jewel of Rochester’s public school system.5 The academy offered a first-rate education, and many young Catholics sought admission there, despite the strong objections of Bishop McQuaid. Most academy students ended their formal education at graduation, but Kate had other ideas; she wanted to go to college. She set her eye on Cornell University in nearby Ithaca, New York, the first major coeducational university. Cornell had admitted its first woman student in 1872, four years after its founding, and on September 16, 1884, Kate took its entrance exams in English grammar, geography, physiology, arithmetic, plane geometry, algebra, and most likely French and German.6 Although mechanical engineering was an exclusively male field at the time, she passed her exams and entered the four-year Bachelor of Engineering program at Cornell’s Sibley College of Engineering and Mechanic Arts, founded in 1870. It was a newsworthy event. “Miss Kate Gleason of Rochester , N. Y.,” the San Francisco Bulletin reported, “is studying practical mechanics in Cornell University and is the only lady student in that...